Joey Logano made it deep into the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs yet again in 2025 - but it still “wasn’t good enough” for the three-time champion.
The 35-year-old from Middletown, Connecticut failed in his bid to repeat his 2024 title success after becoming champion three times since 2018.
Logano is one of the most polarizing figures in the sport, a man who many fans believe profits from NASCAR’s widely-hated postseason format.
There was no saving Joey this year though as he exited at the Round of 8, missing
out on the chance to win it all once again on the first Sunday in November.
Ultimately it was Logano’s inability to win races (one in 2025 vs four in 2024) which cost him dear as he was not able to find the results to progress to the final round.
For Team Penske, a run of three championship victories (Logano in 2022 and 2024 and Ryan Blaney in 2023) was ended as Kyle Larson pipped Denny Hamlin in Phoenix to reach the top of the mountain.
'Not everything we hoped for' - Logano
Those incredible results mean lofty goals moving forward, and in 2025 they were goals which remained unachieved says Logano.
“Obviously not everything we hoped for,” he admitted.
“Our goal is to win the championship every year and we fell short of that. Our goals are really high. By the same token, I feel like there were moments of the year we looked really strong. There were moments of the year where we didn’t capitalize on opportunities to win that we could have, and then I look at the playoffs as OK.
“We didn’t really stack any wins in there, but we were able to work our way into the Round of 8 and be a threat up until the last race in Martinsville.”
“I always say the goal every year when we start the playoffs is to make it 10 weeks of hell. Make sure you have the pressure on you for 10 weeks. Well, we got nine - nine hard weeks. That’s better than six, but it’s not exactly where you want to be. In some cases, you can look at it and say we’ve done a decent job, but on the other hand, it’s just not what our expectation is of ourselves.”
Now, as he looks to 2026, Logano feels the need for change. There is no standing still in the quest for Cup Series supremacy.
What happens in 2026 for Logano and Team Penske?
“You’ve got to do something different because what we did wasn’t good enough, so you can’t do the same thing and expect a different outcome,” he said.
“We have to look to do some different things, and how can we approach things differently. How do we approach race weekend? What do we have to do to be faster on the race track? We just have to try to be better because the bottom line is we were not good enough. That’s the fact. There’s no way to hide from that. You can’t make up all these different scenarios on why you weren’t.”
The final verdict is ‘must do better’ for Logano and the No. 22 Ford. And now he expects to find out why en route to a return to glory in 2026.
“We weren’t good enough, so we have to identify those weaknesses and figure out what to do to change those, and that will happen really quickly.”
